Chapter 26 1964 #2
I retake my seat, determined to say nothing, to frighten nobody. Because it’s nice to be invited to stay, to watch Adele stroking Pilot’s head, to be included in the sanctuary of the Winchesters’ silence.
Until Theo looks up at me and all I can think of is the drop of water that slid down his jaw last night.
I leap up again. “How about I read you a story?” I say to Adele. “I’ll go upstairs and get a book.”
“Is there one you know by heart?” she asks.
That’s how I find myself lying on my back on the couch so I don’t have to look at Theo, recounting We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a story about a woman who won’t leave her castle, who prefers to remain hidden away and unseen.
A woman whose life is turned upside down when a handsome stranger arrives.
A woman whose castle is eventually burned down around her.
“That’s kinda sad,” Adele says when I get to the end. “Why would you want to lock yourself away like that?”
It’s Theo, with the head of his poisoned dog in his lap and his arm around the teenage daughter he retrieved from a hospital a few months ago, who says, “Sometimes it feels safer not to be in the world.”
“I guess.” Adele is quiet for a minute, then she says, “But maybe I should start back at school after New Year? I really like Aria, but I liked going out with my friend too.”
Adele is the bravest of us all.
“I’ll make dinner,” I say, wanting to give them a moment.
I make burgers and we eat them on the couch, talking about nothing in particular while Pilot sleeps in his bed in front of the fire. Adele falls asleep not long after she’s eaten and Theo tucks a blanket over her, then comes to sit on the other couch, next to me.
We’re both quiet. I’m thinking about Adele going to school after the New Year. I’ll have nothing tying me to this castle anymore. Except that I’ve given all my money to my aunt.
“I can hear you thinking,” Theo says.
I smile. “I was trying to do it quietly.”
“You never think quietly. You fill entire rooms with the kinetic energy of your musings. What’s hurting your brain now?”
You’re the one who wears your heart in your eyes, he told me last night, just before he lifted my face up to his. I don’t know why he did that. But I know that I can’t afford to have my heart in my eyes because I’m leaving the Marmont next month. That’s always been my plan.
“Miss Devine Rey’s gone to rehab,” I tell him.
He whistles. “How did she afford that? I know from paying for my rehab and Marley’s too that it isn’t cheap.”
“Marley?” He told me the names of his wives. Honey and Joanie. Not Marley.
And Flitter said he’d had three wives.
He rubs a hand over his face. “Marley was the wife I didn’t marry.”
“Well, that makes no sense,” I say slowly.
He stares at the couch, scrubs a small stain with his fingernail. “I don’t want to tell you this story because…” Another attempt to scratch off the stain. “It doesn’t make me look that great. And I care about what you think of me.”
Oh.
He cares.
Maybe I’m about to embarrass myself. But I’ve always been honest with him. So I say, “I think a lot of you. I don’t know how easy it would be to change that.”
A glimmer of a smile. “I might hold you to that.” He pauses, seems to steel himself, then says in a voice that’s hard to hear, “I met Marley about two years ago. After I’d been to rehab the first time. It was my first sober relationship.”
He sighs. “I loved her. But I didn’t marry her because the women I married all ended up dead.
Not getting married didn’t protect her though.
I relapsed after six months. Straight back to drinking and partying.
And Marley, who’d until then just take a bump of coke at a party, started taking all kinds of things.
I was drunk, so she got wasted. We started fighting.
We broke up. She moved on to someone worse for her than I was.
She almost OD’d a few months back. Someone found her in time.
I got her into rehab because if she’d never met me, she’d never have almost died. ”
“You don’t know that,” I tell him. “You don’t owe her. But it was nice of you all the same.”
Then Theo says, voice sharper now, “You paid for your aunt, didn’t you? I’m paying you the measly sum of fifty dollars a week—”
“Plus you’re covering our rent. Do not,” I say, because I will not take charity ever again. “Don’t offer to pay me more.” Then I ask him, because I need to know what my aunt is facing, “Is it hard? Rehab?”
“The hardest thing I’ve ever done. Marley too. She almost relapsed her first week out. That’s the worst time of all. Thinking you’ve beaten it, only to find that you live in a world where raindrops remind you of vodka and stop signs make you want a Seconal.”
He pauses, starts to say, “Which is why…” But at the same time I say, “That sounds like a line from a Theo Winchester song.”
He laughs and the firelight dances in his eyes. I’m back to thinking about spontaneous combustion.
I remind myself that his daughter is asleep right here in the room. I start to apologize for interrupting him, but he says, “At the risk of ruining my reputation, I feel like hot cocoa. With marshmallows. Want one?”
Now I’m laughing. “Rock star cocoa. Can’t say no to that.”
I watch him in the kitchen stirring hot milk on the stove, wearing jeans and a T-shirt because the fire is so hot, a lick of ink curling into his sleeve. When he looks over at me, I don’t look away.
He carries the cocoa over, sits on the edge of the coffee table, his back to Adele, one foot propped on the couch, facing me. “I wrote a song last night.”
There’s an odd expression on his face.
“You look a bit stunned,” I say. “I thought writing songs was what a rock star did?”
“I haven’t written a song since everything went down with Marley.
It’s like…” He pauses, sips cocoa. “To write a song, you have to love something about life. Every song is about loving and living. But after Marley, after thinking I’d managed to ruin yet another woman’s life, life became just this succession of days I had to get through.
It was partly why I moved here. Who can’t find wonder and awe in a castle?
But maybe you don’t find that stuff in a place.
Maybe you find it in people. Adele’s a pretty awesome kid.
And”—his eyes meet mine—“there are other awesome people around here too.”
I bite my lip so my smile isn’t too goofily oversized. “What’s the song about?”
“Growing up. Being an adult. About how you can blame your shitty dad for your fuck-ups when you’re a kid, but if you’re still doing it as an adult, then maybe you haven’t grown up yet.” His smile is wry. “Not a very sexy subject for a song.”
He reaches over and takes one of the guitars off the stand.
His fingers move over the strings, a reflex action at first. Then he adjusts his position, plays a different chord and, my god—music.
The symphony of lost youth and regrets—that whiskey omelets will curdle your stomach like bad choices, and to not arrive at the Clark County courthouse in Las Vegas for your wedding between eight and nine in the evening because even the justice of the peace has to eat.
And that nobody grows up dreaming of waiting for a justice of the peace to finish his pot roast so you can get married wearing a hangover and the fading tinsel of a bad idea.
That you can live like all of those things are your life, or you can live in spite of those things being your life.
When he’s finished I say, voice a little wobbly, “It’s a really good song.”
Theo’s smile is a bit wobbly too. “Most women would want the song to be about them. And I will write you a song one day, Aria Jones.”
For once in my life, I don’t know what to say. Because with a backdrop of firelight and music, and with his soul exposed in a C minor chord, we’re circling the edges of the two people who’d stood so close together in a turret last night that fire seemed like something I wanted to leap right into.
Theo’s eyes are fixed on mine, and for the first time ever, I let him see me, Aria Jones, who is definitely not, in many ways, most women. But in this way—wanting to trace his upper lip with my tongue—I am like every single woman in America.
Theo swallows.
Adele rolls over and we leap away from each other like naughty children.
I smile. Theo does too.
This is the sexiest thing I’ve ever done.
“We should talk about something,” he says. “Staring is too…” His eyes meander over my cheekbones, stop when they reach my throat. “Tempting.”
Theo Winchester is flirting with me.
I smile even wider. “What shall we talk about?”
“How about I let you do what you like best. Ask questions. Ask me anything.”
“There are other things I like better than asking questions.”
Now Aria Jones is the one doing the flirting.
Theo leans forward and says very softly, “On some other night very soon I want to find out about all the things you like. Every. Single. One.”
Oh, Jesus.
Theo puts his guitar down. His fingers flex.
His daughter exhales an indelicate snore.
We exchange another smile.
“I think I’d better take you up on your offer. I’ll ask you…” I consider, then recall what he’d said earlier about blaming his father. “Tell me about your dad.”
I curse myself. I was doing so well. Why would I ask something so deeply unsexy?
Indeed, Theo rears away. “He was a studio musician for Millennium Wolf. That’s all that’s worth saying.”
I stare at him. “What did he do to you?”
“What makes you think he did anything?” he snaps.
“I recognize a person who carries a lot with them.”
He closes his eyes. Doesn’t speak. Finally he shakes his head exasperatedly. “This is the part where you’re meant to say, ‘we can talk about something else if you want to.’ ”
“Or it’s the part where I say that one of the things I like is when people answer my questions,” I counter.
He picks up the cigarette packet, lights one, rubs his forehead with his thumb.
“My father.” He smokes for a couple of minutes.
“Because of my dad’s job, I grew up thinking Hollywood was normal life.
My mom was long gone; she caught the gravy train to Nashville with a country singer when I was twelve.
My dad started having epic parties. Everyone knew you could go to Roger Winchester’s house to let loose.
No wife; no rules. People came and went, they’d crash for a few days, never throw their bottles in the trash, never empty the ashtrays—hell, they hardly used ashtrays; that’s what the empty bottles were for.
It might be Wednesday and someone would ask when the party started and the answer was, it never stopped. ”
Theo’s whole body is rigid, like this story is trying to claw its way out of him and his soul wants to keep it locked up tight.
“I lost my virginity at one of those parties when I was fifteen.” He shifts position, comes to sit next to me so I can’t see his face when he tells me the rest.
“A woman who was probably in her late thirties found me in the back garden—that’s where I’d sit because the parties happened inside or out front.
She told me it was every boy’s dream to do what she wanted to do.
So I figured I should close my eyes and be happy; nothing was wrong because she was a grown-up—although by then I knew that adults weren’t reliable guides to good behavior.
The next day I wrote a song about it. From then on, writing songs became a thing I did whenever I didn’t know how to feel.
When I was seventeen, my dad heard me playing the song.
He knew Richie King, who’d just started his television show, knew that Richie needed some talent.
So I headed down to the Ambassador’s Ballroom at Venice Beach, and played my guitar and sang this song that was about being screwed by a much older woman and wishing I could have smiled throughout rather than shut my eyes.
Everyone thought it was a sweet song about that moment when you let go of the helium balloon your parents bought you at the county fair.
Either I wasn’t great at metaphor or folks don’t care for subtext. I landed a record deal that night.”
Click of the cigarette lighter. Flare of the flame. Glitter of smoke. Ache of truth.
I reach out and take his hand. He holds on, painfully tight.
There’s more, and worse, to come.
“The morning after the party, my dad clapped me on the back and called me a lucky son of a bitch. Now I was a man, he said. Which means…”
A long, almost endless drag on the cigarette.
It makes me shiver, the way he’s so intent on that Lucky Strike, like he wants more from it than smoke.
Wants to find, in those burning leaves, a way out.
I’ve never seen him drink, never seen him take so much as a Tylenol, but I can see that he’s an addict.
And he always will be. It’s just a question of whether he wins or the booze does.
Theo finally lets go of the smoke. “It means my father knew what was happening. He could have stopped it. Just had to walk out and call my name. But…”
The moon lowers, casting Theo’s shadow and mine against the wall. We look colossal, big enough to catch hold of the moon and let it take us up into the sky where we could give ourselves the futures that the constellations didn’t see fit to grant us in our pasts.
“Instead of the Cheerios, he passed me a whiskey. ‘Drink up,’ he said. ‘Like a man.’ That was the day, at age fifteen, when I became an alcoholic just like him.”
Dear god. How many people in the rooms at the Chateau Marmont might have been entirely different people but for a story like the one Theo just told? Flitter. Calliope too.
Theo finishes his story by saying, “Pilot was the first thing I bought with the money from my record deal. Something with a heart that was mine. He’s been there through it all.”
In response I whisper, “Sometimes I think I’m glad my parents are dead. They never had the chance to disappoint me or to make me hate them. Maybe it’s easier, what I had.”
Theo’s thumb strokes the back of my hand very gently. “You’re the only person in the world who can hear about someone’s miserable childhood and think that becoming an orphan was the better option. You must miss them. Feel nostalgic for them at the very least.”
I shake my head. “I don’t feel nostalgic. I feel like I could murder someone if it meant getting them back.” I pluck the cigarette from his fingers, my exhalation sparkling like the frost of that cold-blooded thought. “What I feel is angrier than nostalgia. Like a wolf standing beside a fawn.”
He turns his head toward me. “You know that the girl who isn’t an orphan, the one with two parents, is still inside you. She’ll always be inside you.”
Maybe. Maybe deep down there’s not just a girl who wants to wish upon stars, but a girl who still believes that those wishes come true.